Stardate 20020826.1457

(Captain's log): Randall writes:

I'm a Major in the Canadian Army.

I love your blog site and have been following it for months, ever since I first stumbled across it...I can't even remember how, as I wasn't active in looking at blogs at the time.

I had to respond to some of what you've said in Stardate 20020825.1249 , when you talked about other nations not being as innovative as Americans...there are notable exceptions, and since you mentioned modifying tanks during Normandy operations, I thought I would mention British designed tanks, known as 'funnies', which the US military would not accept for the D-Day landings, except for Duplex Drive amphibious tanks. Many would later be accepted, especially flail and flamethrower variants, but not until they had been proven in battle with Commonwealth forces.

Randall provides the following quote from this web site:

British Major General Sir Percy Hobart was asked by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to design tanks that could overcome the German's defenses. His devices, known as "Funnies," included bridge-laying, mortar launching, flame-throwing, track laying, and mine destroying tanks, as well as the DD Tank. DD Tanks are also known as "swimming tanks," because they had propellers and flotation devices attached. They were regarded as the Allies' secret weapon (tanks that came out of the water) and more than 900 were used on the beaches. The other "Funnies" were used to a great advantage on the British beaches, but the Americans would not use them, in part because they were based on the Churchill-class tank, which would cause problems for the Americans in repair and finding spare parts.

I know all about Hobart's Funnies. I've always thought that the Americans hurt themselves with NIH by not adopting some of them, especially the flail tank. (One has to wonder how many brave American combat engineers lost their lives manually clearing mine fields which could have been cleared faster and much more safely with a flail.) But note that Hobart was a Major General and that the impetus for this came from Churchill.

The British were enormously creative and produced many extremely innovative advances during the war, as any study of the "Wizard War" will definitely show. But for the British, it had to be done "the right way" and that meant that it had to be done by the right people. The Wizard War was fought by officially designated wizards, not by spontaneous advances created by anonymous sergeants in the ranks.

Percy Hobart would never have gotten anywhere with these advances if he didn't have two stars on his collar. If he'd been a supply sergeant from Birmingham, we'd never have heard of him and never seen tanks like that. On the other hand, the "Rhinoceros" was spontaneously created by such an American sergeant and soon adopted broadly. Based on clues mailed to me by John, I found out that apparently that idea came from a guy named Joe Cullen. The problem with using tanks in the hedgerows was that one would rear up while climbing over the hedgerow, exposing its underbelly to Germans firing their equivalent of the bazooka (the Panzerfaust) as the tank attempted to push its way through the trees growing on top.

The solution to this problem came from a kid who had been a mechanic in Boston before the war. Joe Cullen was his name. He was a sergeant in one of the armor divisions. He said, Let’s take steel rails and weld them to the front of that tank, and they’ll dig into that hedgerow, and it won’t go belly up, and then those big Chrysler engines are powerful enough that it can go right through the hedgerow, and then at that point they can start turning the cannon on the corners where the Germans are with their machine guns, and they can start spraying the hedgerow with their 50 cals. And you can work your way forward in that way.

Now, Rommel didn’t have a suggestion box outside his office door. It’s not the way the Germans fight a war. Bradley did. Cullen had that idea on a Monday. By Tuesday afternoon it had gotten to Bradley, and by Wednesday morning they were putting those steel rails onto the tanks, and it worked.

A different example of how hard it was for outsiders to get their ideas taken seriously in the UK is to study Barnes Wallis, a designer of bombs who had a new insight into how they truly worked. He noticed that surface detonation of bombs was extremely inefficient, because the majority of the concussion was vented into the air instead of into the ground. The result was a really satisfying bang, and broken windows for a wide area, but much less actual destruction than should have resulted. Air is very poor at conducting the concussion to neighboring structures to knock them down. What you really wanted was for the bombs to be much larger, very heavily armored, and to be dropped from a great height with a delayed fuse. They would strike the ground and penetrate deeply and then explode (surrounded on all sides by tamping), and as a result the entire force of the blast would be transmitted far